RIBA Bookshops

Leandro Minuchin Manchester Architecture Research Centre (MARC), University of Manchester, UK

The edited volume is the result of a symposium held in Zlín and Prague in May 2009. The essays explore the city’s urban history from the construction of the first industrial buildings and the obliteration of Zlín’s historical past to the assembling of the functional city. They pass through the Nazi occupation, the nationalization of Bata’s Czech enterprises and the period of privatization and regeneration that began after the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

The book is a timely contribution that revisits the modern unfolding of Zlín’s urban and industrial traces, not as an attempt to reify a building legacy but as a way of actualizing the dilemmas and fissures that occupied modern visionaries and using them as a platform to reassess the place of utopia in the production of urban space. There are two themes explored in the book that provide an interesting contribution to current debates on the political dimension of the modernist movement. The first focuses on the lived spaces of utopia and the second investigates the importance of media in the articulation of the modern project. In relation to the former, sociologist Annett Steinführer highlights the need to distinguish between ‘… the social essence of architecture and urban space and how they were actively interpreted and appropriated by the people who lived there …’ (115). Forher, the built reality of Zlín opens the possibility of extending and complementing the critique of modern utopias beyond their association with specific economic programmes. More than a clear imposition of a rational order, the urban history of Zlín allows, according to Steinführer, to investigate the divergence between the ‘intended’ behaviour sought by the functional project and the ‘actual’ lived experience of its inhabitants. Regarding the second theme, there are several articles in the book that describe the instrumental role played by the media in inscribing and consolidating Bata’s project. The companynot only popularized cinema by building iconic theatres but also scripted and produced hundreds of films. Film studies specialist Petr Szczepanik explains how film was incorporated‘… into the complete network of media used by the company to record, archive and teach its production techniques and promote its developments …’ (204). Media functioned as a dispositifthat visually described the distribution of places and functions in the community, aligning the built fabric of the city with a projected future of urban harmony and progress.The use of multiple disciplinary perspectives clearly strengthens the analysis of Zlín’s urban unfolding. Even though the decision to avoid telling a singular and linear history mighthave produced some overlapping and reiterations, this compilation of Zlín’s stories does well in reinserting the tension between building and utopia in contemporary urban debates.